TechFlow reports that David Tse, Stanford professor and co-founder of Babylon, announced the official launch of BABE (BAbylon-BErkeley), a Groth16 proof verification protocol designed for Bitcoin. The team claims this approach achieves approximately three orders of magnitude (1000x) improvement in setup and storage costs compared to current state-of-the-art solutions, aiming to make "verifying zkSNARK proofs on Bitcoin" more feasible and practically engineerable.
According to the announcement, BABE combines two key ideas: witness encryption over linear pairings and a newly proposed Argo MAC (a garbling primitive). Specifically, witness encryption compresses the complex pairing operations in Groth16 verification into a single scalar multiplication on the BN254 elliptic curve; this scalar multiplication can then be further transformed into a vector homomorphic MAC and efficiently computed via Argo MAC.
The team stated that BABE will be integrated as part of the Babylon Trustless Bitcoin Vault and go live on the Babylon alpha testnet in February. They invite the community to read the paper and provide feedback.
